The Birth of ‘Just Do It’ and Other Magic Words

TO the list of great copy writers in advertising, add an unlikely name: Gary Gilmore.

Mr. Gilmore, the notorious spree-killer, uttered the words “Let’s do it” just before a firing squad executed him in Utah in 1977. Years later, the phrase became the inspiration for Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign.

The episode might make you wonder about the genesis of some other offbeat ads over the years. Where does someone get the idea to write a jingle about Oscar Mayer wiener envy? And how exactly does one dream up a talking gecko selling car insurance?

The revelation about the “Just Do It” slogan is one of many fly-on-the-wall anecdotes that the famous names of the advertising world share in a new documentary by the filmmaker Doug Pray called “Art & Copy,” to be released in New York on Friday.

The film takes some of advertising campaigns that are most indelibly seared into the American consciousness — “Got Milk?,” “I (Heart) NY,” “I Want My MTV,” to name a few — and examines their path from ad slogans to pop culture glory.

“That was not the version I heard when I arrived at Nike,” she said. “I’m sure they didn’t want anyone to really know.”

Dan Wieden, who first realized that a slight tweaking of Mr. Gilmore’s last words might make a good slogan for athletic gear, said the resonance of “Just Do It” was completely inadvertent and unforeseen.

“I like the ‘do it’ part of it,” Mr. Wieden, a co-founder of Wieden & Kennedy, says in the film, recalling the moment it dawned on him to use the phrase. “None of us really paid that much attention. We thought, ‘Yeah. That’d work,’ ” he says, adding, “People started reading things into it much more than sport.”

“Art & Copy” not only examines how seminal campaigns were born, but also, in the case of “Got Milk” and others, how they almost died premature deaths. Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein of Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the brains behind the milk ads and the Budweiser frogs, explain how both of those concepts almost never saw the light of day.

In the case of the “Got Milk?” concept, people at Goodby, Silverstein thought it was lazy, not to mention grammatically incorrect.

Photo

At top, Jeff Goodby, of the firm that devised the Got Milk? campaign, and at center, an actors reaction to the question. At bottom, a scene from a Wheres the Beef? commercial for Wendys.Credit
Seventh Art Releasing

“It’s clunky. It’s not even English,” recalls Mr. Silverstein in the film, expressing his initial distaste for the idea. He later gleefully adds, “It worked!”

Mr. Goodby tells how marketers at Anheuser Busch were ready to kill the frog campaign until August Busch III spoke up and said, “Those lizards are really funny.”

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Mr. Pray, the film’s director, said part of his reason for doing the film was to shed light on the people behind ads that — for good or ill — have left a mark on American culture.

“Whether we like it or not, they have shaped our culture to a huge degree. And nobody knows where they’re coming from,” Mr. Pray, a documentarian who has also directed commercials, said in a recent interview. “We know the captains of industry. We know the heads of G.M. But somehow that’s not true with advertising.”

Shows like “Mad Men” on AMC and movies like “The Hucksters” are probably the closest most Americans have in the way of exposure to advertising executives. Some of the subjects interviewed or examined in Mr. Pray’s film — William Bernbach, George Lois, Mary Wells Lawrence — are the original mad men and women who shaped the era the television show depicts.



The characters in Mr. Pray’s film, however, are a far cry from the martini-swilling hedonists portrayed on AMC.

“I don’t think anyone could confuse me with those guys on the ‘Mad Men’ show,” Mr. Lois said in a recent interview, using a more colorful word to describe the characters. The advertising world in New York in the 1960s, he said, “was intelligent. It was sharp. It was irascible. It was thrilling. It was cultural provocatism.”

“Art & Copy,” Mr. Lois added, is a nostalgic look back to a time when advertising had more cultural significance. “Back then, there was this driving need, this passion. It was like a crusade. Everybody knew something important was happening. We were changing the culture of America.”

Mr. Pray said that the true believer, change-the-world outlook that Mr. Lois and others espoused about advertising initially escaped him. “I never really looked at it like that. I always saw it as just commerce,” he said.

But by examining how resonant ads were made and seeing firsthand their cultural impact, Mr. Pray said he could appreciate them as more than just a way to move merchandise.

“There’s a beauty to things like ‘Got Milk?’ or ‘Just Do It’ or ‘Where’s the Beef?’ — this incredibly simple writing that seems to kind of say more,” he said. “They seem to work on some kind of a different level that has nothing to do with the product.”

Correction: August 22, 2009

The Advertising column on Thursday, about a new documentary on the advertising world, misspelled the surname of the filmmaker in one reference in some editions. The error also appeared in an accompanying caption. As the column correctly noted elsewhere, the filmmaker is Doug Pray, not Pay.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Birth of ‘Just Do It’ and Other Magic Words. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe